Project description

The ability to monitor the Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) where VNFs are in operation will be a key part of Service Assurance within an NFV environment, in order to enforce SLAs or to detect violations, faults or degradation in the performance of NFVI resources so that events and relevant metrics are reported to higher level fault management systems. If fixed function appliances are going to be replaced by virtualized appliances the service levels, manageability and service assurance needs to remain consistent or improve on what is available today. As such, the NFVI needs to support the ability to monitor:

Traffic monitoring and performance monitoring of the components that provide networking functionality to the VNF, including: physical interfaces, virtual switch interfaces and flows, as well as the virtual interfaces themselves and their status, etc.

All of the statistics and events gathered must be collected in-service and must be capable of being reported by standard Telco mechanisms (e.g. SNMP), for potential enforcement or correction actions. In addition, this information could be fed to analytics systems to enable failure prediction, and can also be used for intelligent workload placement.

Scope

The output of the project will provide interfaces to support monitoring of the NFVI. The project will start off with developing plugins for collectd (a system statistics collection daemon) to enable the collection of platform stats and events and relay gathered information to fault management applications or the VIM. The scope is limited to collecting/gathering the events and stats and relaying them to a relevant endpoint. The project will not enforce or take any actions based on the gathered information.

Testability

The project will work with functest to test the provided functionality.

Documentation

Architecture Specification

Release Notes

Configuration guide

User guide

Dependencies

The relevant upstream project for this contribution is collectd.

The project will work with the Doctor project and the VES project from a feature perspective to provide both projects with NFVI metrics and events.

The project will work with Releng, Octopus, OPNFV docs, Fuel and functest for each release.

For the integration and test requirements, there is a dependency on currently available Pharos hardware